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I like fisheye photography so I thought I'd keep my eye open for a nice used Olympus 8mm f1.8 at a reasonable price. I found a nice one this week on eBay so I'm offering up my Samyang. It's the black version and is in excellent condition. There's some minor scuffing to the hood caused by abrasion from the cap (they all do this), but otherwise it's cosmetically and optically perfect. It even focuses at infinity when the focus ring is set at that value (they don't all do this!).

The little 7.5mm Samyang is brilliant in my book and a real bargain for the price so can't imagine selling mine. I'd be interested in your thoughts Paul when you've used the 8mm a bit as to how it compares with the Samyang and if you feel the probably huge cash difference is worth the extra light gathering ability. I guess you'll be shooting the stars with it too?

I did a comparison of the two at an Oly day at Duxford last year and apart from some insignificant differences in the way they both draw images, the Oly is a bit sharper in the corners at wide apertures and a bit less prone to flare, but personally I didnít feel these were quite worth the extra investment and weight.

There are a couple of niche applications where the differences are significant, however. Night sky photography is certainly one, where Iím told f1.8 is extremely useful for reducing exposure times/ISO, and the lens is pretty unique for this.

Also, Iíve just discovered that the Samyang is a very good IR lens, with excellent contrast and no significant hot spots. I donít know whether the Oly is any good for this, but with its complex optical formula i predict that it wonít be.

I did a comparison of the two at an Oly day at Duxford last year and apart from some insignificant differences in the way they both draw images, the Oly is a bit sharper in the corners at wide apertures and a bit less prone to flare, but personally I didnít feel these were quite worth the extra investment and weight.

There are a couple of niche applications where the differences are significant, however. Night sky photography is certainly one, where Iím told f1.8 is extremely useful for reducing exposure times/ISO, and the lens is pretty unique for this.

Also, Iíve just discovered that the Samyang is a very good IR lens, with excellent contrast and no significant hot spots. I donít know whether the Oly is any good for this, but with its complex optical formula i predict that it wonít be.

Interesting about it being good for IR. I saw that Steve Gosling has recently had an EM5 Mk I converted for IR and is happy with it.

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- At comparable apertures there is little to chose between them. The Olympus is a little sharper in the corners at the Samyang's max aperture, but by f5.6 it would be hard to tell them apart.

- The Olympus remains very sharp wide open. Quite amazing really. The main difference you see between f4 and f1.8 is some vignetting, but it's really very little.

- The Oly has better starbursts, but the Samyang isn't too shabby either.

So, why go for the Olympus over the Samyang? Well, if you only use fisheyes infrequently it would be hard to recommend paying 3x the price of the Samyang. However, if you use this sort of lens a lot then the Oly is worth having:

- The f1.8 comes in really useful for handheld indoor shots. It's two stops faster than the Samyang.

- The f1.8 comes in useful for wide-field astro (but I'm still to do much of this - even though it was one of the justifications I made to myself when I bought it).

- AF is useful. Even though DOF in a FE is large, when shooting close up it's still pretty narrow. Close-up FE shots are a lot of fun: